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I stare at her, trying to get what she’s telling me.
‘My directions were to keep you buckled and locked down.’
‘Locked down?’
‘Yes.’ She sighs and gives me a sympathetic pat. ‘I’m sorry.’
She reaches behind my back, and a second later, a large helmet woven of thick steel chains clamps down over my head. I cry out, but the sound is muffled. She squeezes my hand once, and I calm a little. Then more metal locks down, binding my wrists.
‘Your rebound will only take an hour,’ she reassures me, although I can barely hear her through the twisted metal. ‘Good luck, Adelice.’
I wish I’d asked her name.
The helmet blocks most of the room around me, but I can see through the gaps. It’s an inconsequential room with bare white walls, except for the clock counting down in the corner.
The nausea hits first. The floor drops from under me and my stomach turns over, but I don’t fall. The helmet keeps my head perfectly straight and
my neck stretched, so I don’t throw up, but I want to. Closing my eyes, I breathe evenly, trying to keep the sickness at bay. When I open them and peer through the steel wires, the room around me is gone, and I’m surrounded by a shimmering array of lights. The sight calms me and I focus on studying the gleaming strands that comprise the rebound compartment. Glowing beams twist across the room and then long threads of grey knit up through them, crisscrossing over the light into a luminous fabric of gold and silver. Somewhere a girl sits, replacing the weave of the rebound chamber with that of a chamber in a coventry, effectively moving me from one location to the other. I’m travelling hundreds of miles without moving a muscle. It’s a delicate procedure, which is why it’s reserved for the most important people in Arras. The Stream ran a special story vlip about the process a few years ago.
Gradually the light disappears and slowly – too slowly – grey walls form in patches around me, and the radiant canvas of the rebound process fades into a concrete room. It takes an eternity before the beams are gone, but when the last flickers into wall, I’m happy to feel the helmet being lifted from my head.
A group of sombrely clad officers surrounds me. The one who removed the helmet hesitates at the cuffs on my arms. They ache from being shackled during the trip, and I’m about to tell him so when a young blond in an expensive suit steps forward and holds his hand up. His head is cocked to the side, and I realise he’s on his complant. Despite his obvious youth, he seems to be in charge. He’s the kind of boy my classmates would zero in on in the daily Bulletin and giggle over as they passed his image around. But even this close to him, I only feel curiosity.
‘Sedate her.’
‘Sir?’ the officer asks in surprise.
‘She wants her sedated,’ the blond boy orders. ‘You want to ask her why?’
The officer shakes his head, but as a medic rushes forward with a syringe I can see the apology in the boy’s blindingly blue eyes.
3
When I was eight, the girl next door, Beth, found a bird’s nest that had fallen on the line marking her yard from ours. I was not allowed to enter her yard, and she never came into mine. She applied that line to all of our interactions, keeping a firm boundary between us at home, at academy, and at the commons where we played with the rest of the neighbourhood girls. Beth made sure the other girls didn’t talk to me either, so I kept to myself. Her bullying made me timid in her presence – always drawing back instead of coming forward – so I watched as she batted the nest along the property marker with a stick. I didn’t say anything until I saw the speckle of blue as it tumbled over.
‘Stop.’ My command was so low she shouldn’t have heard it, but our street was as quiet as usual, and her head perked up to stare at me, the stick frozen in place.
‘What did you say?’ she asked in a voice that wanted me to remember my place, not answer her.
Whatever that glimpse of blue had stirred in my chest, I grabbed on to it and pushed the demand out louder.
Beth edged closer to the line, but didn’t cross it. Instead, she hoisted the nest on her stick and tossed it over to my yard. ‘There,’ she mocked. ‘Take your precious nest. It doesn’t matter, the mama bird isn’t coming back for it now. They don’t want their eggs after someone else has touched them.’
Hatred seethed inside me, but I stood on my side and watched her walk into her house without saying another word. She glanced at me just once as she opened her front door, and her eyes were full of scorn. I stared at the nest for a long time: two eggs peeked out of the grass next to it. I thought of myself and my sister when I looked at them: two sister sparrows. Gathering up some fallen leaves from our yard, I covered my bare hands before placing the eggs into their spots in the nest, and then lifted it back to the tree in our yard. But the small gesture did nothing to soothe the aching rage building in my chest.
As I watched the nest, growing increasingly frustrated with my inability to protect the tiny lives inside, the strands of the weave glimmered to life around me. The tree and the nest blurred like a delicate tapestry before my eyes, strands that called out to be touched, and I reached and slipped my fingers around them. Although I’d been aware of the fabric of life woven around us before, for the first time I noticed how bands of gold stretched across it horizontally, and how coloured threads wove up through them to create the objects around me. As I watched, the golden strands of light flickered slightly, and I realised they were slowly moving forwards, away from the moment in front of me. They weren’t simply fibres in Arras’s tapestry – they were lines of time. Tentatively, I reached for one of the golden fibres. Encouraged by its silky texture, I took it and yanked it hard, trying to force the time bands back to a moment when the mama bird was guarding her precious babies. But the strands resisted. No matter what I did, they kept on creeping forward. There was no going back.
The mama bird never returned. I checked on the little blue eggs every morning until one day my dad relieved me from my vigilance and the whole nest vanished. I didn’t touch those eggs, but I guess the mama bird didn’t know where to look; that’s why she didn’t come back.
There is only darkness. It is damp, and with the palms of my hands I can feel that the floor of my cell alternates between smooth and jagged, but one thing is constant: it is always cold. My parents’ suspicions about the Guild were well-founded. I wonder if my mother knows where I am. I picture her circling our house, searching for me in her own empty nest.
If she’s still alive. My heart flutters in response to some new emotion. It sits like a big lump in my throat as I remember the body bag leaking onto the floor. And now they have Amie. The idea that she’s at their mercy claws at my stomach. Never in the years my parents were training me did I understand why they were doing it. They told me that they didn’t want to lose me. My father spoke of the dangers of too much power, but in vague, noncommittal terms, and my mother always shushed him when he became too impassioned. The Guild gave us food and perfectly controlled weather and health patches. I have to believe those people – the humane government of my memory – have Amie now. Whatever my crimes, those officials wouldn’t hold her accountable. But I can’t ignore how wrong I was about the Guild or my parents. And it’s my fault she was taken. It was my hands that gave me away at testing. I run them along the rough cracks in the patches of stone until my fingertips are torn and bloody.
The facts are inescapable. I’d been taught to hide my gift by my parents. All I had to do was pretend for a month while I performed the Guild’s testing and I would have been released from service. And if I hadn’t been so selfish, so scared of disappointing my mom and dad on the night of my retrieval, none of this would have happened. But I’m not sure I know how things might be different now. Even if I had told them I’d slipped during testing, would we have escaped? Sifting through flashes of my childhood for clues, I remember my parents being strong, but isolated from the rest of our community. They genuinely loved each other. Dad would leave Mom little love notes around the house, which I found both revolting and oddly reassuring when I stumbled across one. He treated her with a respect that few of the other grown men I encountered in Romen showed women or girls. I’d believed this was why they didn’t want me to become a Spinster, because it would tear our family apart – and our family was all we had. But beneath the happy veneer of our home, there were always secrets, particularly my training, which was kept from Amie. They told me she wouldn’t understand, and the tone they used when they explained this was the same one they used when discussing my ‘condition’ with each other.
In the dark, I can’t hide from the only thing I can finally see. I didn’t want to see the treason in their actions. I ignored the implication of their words and heard what I needed to hear to feel safe, not what they were actually telling me. And now I’ve lost my chance to know my parents. All I can do is fit together the pieces they left behind in my memory.
No one comes to visit me. There’s no food and no water. And no light. This can’t be how they treat the Spinsters. I must be being punished for my family’s treason. I was taught about the coventries in academy and shown pictures of the formidable towered compounds, one of which I think I’m in now. But the walls and buttresses of those compounds housed sumptuous rooms and art and plumbing. There’s not even a toilet in this cell. I’m forced to go in the corner. The mustiness of the stone overpowers the smell at first, but even the muck of the cell can’t control it forever and now the acrid odour of bile prickles my nostrils. In the dark, the smells are becoming more acute, burning my throat.
